In Praise of Leisure – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education:
(Via chronicle.com)
Author: cogiddo
On the quality of academic software
On the quality of academic software:
Software is eating the world. Despite a poor year, Facebook has a market capitalization of $65 billion. This little company with barely 2000 developers is worth as much as a car marker.
Students should take notice. I would expect countless students to come to college demanding top-notch software training. I would expect graduate students to focus on building gorgeous software programs.
Yet software produced in universities and colleges is awful, and it is not getting better. I have a few explanations:
(Via Daniel Lemire’s blog) Highly recommended. Read all about it at the link on the top.
My encapsulation of mathematical modeling in economics
I wrote this in a comment on Google+ today, in a discussion of the death of Elinor Ostrom. I kind of like it, so I am putting it here, too:
Economic theory building proceeds by using abstractions to encapsulate what are thought to be important basic principles of interactive decision-making and then uses mathematics as a language for analysis to reach conclusions. There is also an empirical side that tries to find appropriate values for some of the parameters that are used in theorizing, with disputed success. The social side of human behavior is quite important in some parts of mathematical economic modeling; economic network analysis and the analysis of information diffusion and information cascades being some prominent examples that spring to mind.
The repugnant conclusion and economic theory denialism
Many macroeconomic theorists appear utterly reluctant to accept the abject disaster that macroeconomic theory has become, as made evident by the crisis that started in 2007.
It just occurred to me today that, since most economists, and even more so most macroeconomists, are unquestioningly utilitarian (why else are they always looking to maximize criteria such as a representative agent’s discounted present value of lifetime utility?), they may be just unaware of the repugnant conclusion from population ethics and yet their work pushes the world towards it. Here is a succinct presentation from the page just linked:
In Derek Parfit’s original formulation the Repugnant Conclusion is characterized as follows: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living” (Parfit 1984).
This seems to me to be consonant with the approach of the austerians, who rely on mainstream DSGE models in macroeconomics to make recommendations to make a great number of presently living people more and more miserable with austerity measures, in order to safeguard the well-being of future generations, which the austerians think they only know how to do. Never mind the obvious fact that austerity measures don’t even advance the cause of a market economy and economic growth; all they do is give political power to neonazis and leftist extremists.
Can you tell I am first and foremost an incorrigible economic theorist? Here the world may well be entering a second Great Depression, to be capped off with widespread war, and I am talking about arcane philosophical topics. Except that, there may, just may, be a glimmer of hope in getting austerians to realize just how badly their recommendations are behaving and to learn a bit more social welfare criteria than utilitarianism. (I know, I will keep dreaming.)
The life of a number-crunching analyst
I just discovered this Freakonomics blog post by Justin Wolfers, thanks to his post about it on Google+. The post includes some brilliant visualizations of the life of a number-crunching analyst by Elisabeth Fosslien. Enjoy it here: http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/02/29/the-life-of-the-number-crunching-analyst/
The depressing assessment of experts on the latest “rescue package” for Greece
This depressed me yesterday. Read it and be depressed yourself today. From Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog on washingtonpost.com:
Seminar on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years – Introduction
Ah, the sudden appearance of all the essays on Graeber’s book is now explained. One more worth reading, and setting the stage for the follow-ups on Crooked Timber, by Christ Bertram.
Seminar on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years – Introduction:
(Via Crooked Timber)
The unmourned death of the double coincidence
Yet more on Graeber’s book, this time from John Quiggin.
The unmourned death of the double coincidence:
Graeber shows, convincingly enough for me, that the story conventionally told by economists, in which money emerges as a replacement for barter systems, is nonsense. In fact, as he notes this point has been made by anthropologists many times and ignored just as often. Thanks to the marvels of auto-googling, I’ve been aware for some time that my namesake, Alison Hingston Quiggin gave the definitive demonstration long ago in her ‘Survey of Primitive Money’. Graeber sharpens the point by arguing that the real source of money is as a way of specifying debts.
(Via Crooked Timber)
The world economy is not a tribute system
Having just posted about DeLong and Rossman on Graeber’s book, here is another essay on the topic, from Crooked Timber. Choice excerpt follows; I recommend reading the whole thing.
The world economy is not a tribute system:
In short – if there is evidence to support Graeber’s rather sweeping claims about the nature of the global economic system, he doesn’t provide it to the reader. Perhaps this evidence is buried in his sources somewhere. Perhaps not. But when one self-consciously makes grand claims that everyone else is wrong, one should have good evidence, and be prepared to produce it up front. Graeber, unless he’s keeping it very close to his chest indeed, has no evidence at all. This doesn’t seem to me to live up to the (admittedly high) standard that Graeber sets for himself.
(Via Crooked Timber)
How the poor debtors still sell their daughters, How in the drought men still grow fat « Code and Culture
Brad DeLong points to this lengthy review of David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5000 Years”. I am in the process of reading Graeber’s book in bits and pieces in between my, rather pressing currently, stretches of work and the review is coming at the right time for me. Of particular interest is the example about Apple Inc. that points out that Graeber’s claims about facts cannot always be trusted. DeLong has a long blog post on this. The original essay by Gabriel Rossman is here:
The curious incident of DD on the Web 